Low grad rates for black men worrisome

Thursday

Seventeen-year-old Jonathan Lykes said he wonders why black males have low rates of graduating from high school and going on to college.

Seventeen-year-old Jonathan Lykes said he wonders why black males have low rates of graduating from high school and going on to college.

Lykes, a junior from Shaw High School in East Cleveland, thinks the answer is that blacks have lost their culture.

"I'm not really one who likes to blame it on slavery or imperialism, or a race being stripped of their culture to begin with, but the simple fact of the matter is that's where our culture started in America," said Lykes, who is black.

Lykes is a member of the National Honor Society, student council president and a two-year participant in the National Poetry Competition. He was among many who spoke to about 2,000 educators, religious leaders, parents, politicians and students yesterday at the Greater Columbus Convention Center about why too many black males and the public schools they attend are giving up on each other.

As a group, black males had the lowest graduation rate in Ohio in the 2004-2005 school year, at 64 percent.

In contrast, 88 percent of white males graduated from high school that school year. The low graduation rates and lack of college contribute to black men having lower incomes and higher unemployment rates, said Gov. Ted Strickland, who organized the conference.

"This is an issue that is with us, it's very real and it affects lives of young people in very tragic ways," Strickland said, noting that for many of these youths, the end of the road is prison.

Strickland told the predominantly black luncheon crowd that the gathering was "the beginning of touching the lives of young people who have been neglected," and pledged to "mobilize the financial resources to actually make a difference."

Strickland has targeted $20 million in the two-year state budget to closing the achievement gap, but the budget is still making its way through the legislature.

The conference was coordinated by C.J. Prentiss, a former state senator from Cleveland who now is a special assistant to Strickland on ending the gap.

Prentiss said she hoped the meeting energized and mobilized Ohio to attack the problem and focus on the high schools with the lowest graduation rates.

After the luncheon, the crowd broke into small groups to link volunteers with specific schools that need help.

"Certainly, that's not all going to happen today, but what happens today is we appoint these local committees that are willing to do this," Prentiss said.

Derrick Holmes, a 29-year-old telecommunication worker from Columbus who attended the conference, said there will be no simple solutions to the problem because each struggling student has different issues. Adults need to listen to those students if they hope to counter the forces that are keeping them from succeeding in school.

"We do a great job of talking this stuff up," said Holmes, who volunteers to mentor young people at Columbus' Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church, 3161 E. 5th Ave.

He wondered how long many of the conference attendees would stay personally involved with closing the achievement gap.

"It becomes a commitment," Holmes said. "It makes no sense to have 1,500 people involved in an initiative, and then it becomes a social club and you only see 300 of them down the road."

Lykes would like to see mentors in the schools teaching black students about history, culture and self-discipline -- messages being drowned out by "hip-hop culture," which stresses making money now, illegally, he said.

Lykes said one rap song offers the message: "I dropped out in eighth grade, and I'm still making money in eight ways."

"I hear 2-year-olds singing those songs, and they grow up with that mentality," he said.

bbush@dispatch.com

On the Web • See the graduation rates for students in Franklin County districts, by race and gender, at Dispatch.com/web.

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